Discover: Redesigning HR Delivery Under Financial Pressure: How a Tiered Operating Model at UC Irvine Is Reducing Cost, Eliminating Redundancy, and Strengthening HR Resilience
- Redesigning HR service delivery across a highly decentralized university in response to sustained budget pressure by using opportunistic centralization, shared service pilots, and vacancy controls to reduce duplication, improve governance, and stabilize HR operations without top-down mandates.
- Delivering early, tangible financial impact by identifying extreme redundancy within units, including 17 HR FTEs in a single division, and projecting the elimination of at least three roles, representing an estimated $300k+ in annual cost savings once fully implemented, while preventing replacement hiring through targeted freezes and structural reviews.
- Building a more scalable and lower risk HR operating model through tiered service levels that centralize transactional work such as onboarding and payroll, retain light touch HR support within units, and escalate compliance and risk heavy issues to central HR, improving service quality, consistency, and workforce sustainability amid ongoing fiscal constraint.